Woodley: Inspired by a courageous Israeli

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of spending a week in the company of one of the most fascinating and courageous Middle Easterners of the 21st century. I accompanied Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe as he crossed Canada on a lecture tour which included a stop in Calgary. Imagine my surprise, therefore, at the vicious opinion piece by Naomi Lakritz that appeared in the Herald May 8 entitled, Threat to Israel mustn’t be downplayed.

According to Lakritz, Pappe is a “revisionist,” someone who “can make words mean nothing at all,” who is “polluting Middle East historiography” and poisoning minds. While Lakritz may disagree with Pappe’s concern for Palestinian human rights, the rabid tone of her piece is a disservice to her Calgary audience.

Pappe was born in Israel, in Haifa, and served in the Israeli Army in the Golan Heights during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Pappe graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1978 and obtained his PhD from Oxford in 1984. His thesis — on Britain and the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the events of 1948 — was supervised by renowned scholar Roger Owen, author of many classics on Middle East history and currently the A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History at Harvard University. Pappe’s research on this decisive period in Israeli-Palestinian history has always met stringent standards.

From 1984 until 2006 Dr. Pappe was a senior lecturer at Israel’s University of Haifa. Following death threats from Israeli right-wing extremists in 2007, he accepted a post at the University of Exeter, and is currently Director of Exeter’s European Centre for Palestine Studies. He has published numerous books relating to events surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948, and the concurrent dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Lakritz’s lack of respect for Pappe’s service to Israel and for his scholarly accomplishments is disturbing. Pappe’s analysis merits careful attention, regardless of one’s own views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I was beside Pappe as he answered Lakritz’s questions, and her opinion piece repeatedly misrepresented his answers to her questions. When asked about Hamas’ admittedly defective Charter, Lakritz only described the first part of Pappe’s answer. Were she interested in presenting a clear view of Pappe to her readers, she would have mentioned how Pappe sees great potential in Hamas’ repeated offers to negotiate a peace agreement based on the 1967 borders — more than Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu will commit to doing. Just last week, in fact, Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh again reconfirmed this position in an interview published in the Jerusalem Post.

Later on in her piece, Lakritz quotes Pappe as saying, “You have to understand the source of violence,” and again she ignores the rest of his response in order to insert her own spin. It’s a shame, as Pappe understands the sources of Palestinian violence better than perhaps any other Israeli today, having written books about how 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes in 1948. Sadly, the insights of this brilliant Israeli historian — very familiar with the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people — are given no space in Lakritz’s article.

Alas, Lakritz’s attack on Pappe does not stop there. Lakritz even disparages Pappe’s ability to recognize a danger to “his people.” As the son of German Jews who fled to Palestine to escape Nazi persecution in the 1930s, and who lost relatives in the Holocaust, Pappe is quite capable of recognizing genuine dangers to Jews.

Sadly, Lakritz’s misrepresentations are not limited to Pappe, but also extend to fellow Israeli historian Benny Morris, whom she also cites in her piece. Lakritz quotes Morris to attack Pappe for what she calls Pappe’s “revisionist drivel about Israel’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Palestinians.” In fact, while Morris challenges Pappe’s scholarship, he does not deny the fact that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel occurred, having himself written extensively on this same topic.

But ultimately, Lakritz’s piece was not really about informing Calgarians about Pappe’s perspectives. In retrospect, her interview with him was simply an excuse to trot out a number of pet arguments demonizing the Palestinian side of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In my view, the admirable people of our time are not those who repeat the tired arguments of the past, but those like Pappe who dare to think in new ways. Pappe had all the privileges Israeli and Western society had to offer, yet he has chosen to dedicate his life to documenting the tragic history of the Palestinian people, and to protecting their human rights.

In concluding his talk in Vancouver the day after he spoke in Calgary, Pappe’s closing remark captures the essence of his courage: “I am not interested in what is possible but in what is just. And if the just is not possible, I will work for it until it is possible.”

Thomas Woodley is president of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, a secular non-profit organization dedicated to enabling Canadians and their legislators to contribute to justice, peace and development in the Middle East.

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